The "legacy" Mastodon network is unsafe and overly restrictive, and the mainstream will not force itself to unsee this in the way that the FOSS community has. If Eugen Rochko won't accommodate a centralised and consumer-focused mindset, he will ultimately be usurped as primary steward of the project.
It's the doorstep of summer, you wanna get fit for hols, and the media are recommending a new gymnasium chain. Everyone seems to be signing up. A couple of million people have joined in the past few weeks. So you follow suit. You go to the brand website and it gives you a few gym addresses to choose from. You select the nearest, fill in the signup form, then set off for your first workout.
But when you arrive, there's no reception, no staff, and the "workout area" is just a damp basement with a few weights strewn around. Said basement is actually the main living space for a renowned local creep known as Weird Willy, and it belongs, as I'm sure all creative writers will already be aware, to his mother. That's right, the intention here was that Weird Willy would sit watching while you did exercises in his mother's basement. You run. Obviously.
But what happens when you don't realise you're in Weird Willy's mother's basement? When you can't realise? When there are no visual triggers to prompt you to run? Enter Mastodon, an approximate virtualisation of the above. The decentralised concept of Mastodon allows your local neighbourhood creep to set up a server in his mother's basement, then promote it using the protocol's trusted brand.
His lair is thus perceived by the uninitiated public as "Mastodon, hot alternative to Twitter", and not in its true guise of "Masturdon, personal peep-hole of Weird Willy, drooling voyeur extraordinaire". And the community has a very big problem.
If you've had your ear to the ground for grassroots mainstream thoughts on Mastodon, you'll be hearing a new chant. No longer the compliant hum of approval that you'd hear from the network's predominantly male userbase of FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) enthusiasts this time last year. Far from it. Women in particular are expressing concerns over Mastodon's safety, based on the inscrutability of a system with thousands of unvetted administrators. And the genders have been united in criticising Mastodon's over-complicated signup process, its wildly unpredictable moderation logic, etc.
I've also seen reports of people being placed on spam lists - something I personally experienced after joining a Fediverse instance. I've seen an accusation of attempted ID theft. And realistically, why wouldn't this happen? Mastodon is a free-for-all. The only surprise is that it doesn't happen more. Now that there's a jetstream of naive newbies frantically charging at Mastodon, spammers and scammers will surely smell the scent of opportunity.
Then there are the headaches over scaleability. A comparatively minor exodus from Twitter to Mastodon has already unearthed new and perhaps unforeseen hurdles such as "spike-blocking". "Spike-blocking" occurs when one Mastodon instance gains too great a potential traffic load for small servers to handle, and small server admins block ALL federation from the high traffic instance as a precaution.
For example, several huge celebs join Instance A, creating a viral buzz that threatens to ovewhelm federated (i.e. connected) Instances X, Y and Z with levels of traffic they can't handle. To remove the threat of that spike, Instances X, Y and Z simply block Instance A. The effect of this divides the Mastodon network into increasingly isolated chunks, and ultimately, prevents any explosively viral instance from federating with the grassroots at all.
If Mastodon is to remain anywhere near decentralised, it can't address any of the above problems. They are properties of decentralisation itself, and they can only be solved through centralisation.
Mastodon's founder and lead developer, Eugen Rochko, has persisted in extolling his old values of decentralisation, despite the fact that they're the exact opposite of what the mainstream public wants to hear. The public are screaming:
"Just give us ONE WEBSITE that we can easily sign up to, and trust, and intuitively use!"
But Rochko himself is not in a position to do that, unless he tosses his values into the nearest waste basket and commits to centralisation.
The problem he now has is that other forces are recognising that Mastodon must centralise, and are taking steps to nudge it in that direction.
Last week, for example, we saw Vivaldi creating Vivaldi Social, using the Mastodon software but clearly aiming to circumvent some of the problems of decentralisation.
Brands have created what are intended to be "centralised Mastodons" in the past, but they've had very non-mainstream moderation biases, and have thus been unsuitable for the average Twitter user. Vivaldi Social looks to be roughly mirroring the moderation policies of the pre-Musk Twitter, and that essentially makes it mainstream-compatible - provided the brand doesn't get too caught up in promoting itself and its other products.
Vivaldi Social is not centralised per se. It does federate with other Mastodon instances. But it's already trading on centralised values, and wisely so. Vivaldi eliminates problems such as signup confusion and the "Weird Willy" factor, and the brand is boasting high capacity, which should help steady confidence. Already, I noticed, TV's "Money Saving Expert" Martin Lewis has signed up. He has over two million Twitter followers, and he drove nearly 8K across to his Vivaldi account in a couple of days.
Would I join Vivaldi Social? No. I wasted a breathtaking amount of time on Twitter for a productive gain of near zero, and I'm not about to start running exactly the same status-shaming, lab-rat treadmill for a different landlord. But Vivaldi Social will solve most of the problems the mainstream is currently citing in relation to Mastodon, and it's easily detachable from the Fediverse for full centralisation if commercial impetus and user demand should require it.
Whilst users are not going to begin asking for centralisation per se, they may begin to demand features that are incompatible with the rest of the federated network. The ability to change usernames, for example. Or a search engine that actually works. Search could be improved unilaterally, but if it were, it would doubtless drive a mass migration toward the searchable instance, because... Well, most people on social media want to be found, so they'll naturally move to the place they believe makes that most likely.
It's only now that Mastodon is starting to serve as a real replacement for Twitter that we see not only its glaring deficiencies, but also the potential dangers those deficiencies could cause.
And it's not just Mastodon's search mechanism that needs a huge facelift. The entire navigation system is inadequate for anyone used to Twitter.
Last Tuesday, LibreOffice publicised an intention to integrate blockchain tech into their product, citing an association with the Ethereum Foundation, but admitting they had no use case and inviting users to suggest one. I mean, nothing says "Ethereum wants to give us pocket money" like "How can we needlessly force blockchain into a package that barely even needs the Internet?", right?
So as one might expect, LibreOffice got absolutely leathered, both in the Fediverse and on Twitter. It was a joy to witness such a triumph for collective opposition, but the backlash appeared more powerful in the Fediverse than on Twitter. Better worded. Better reasoned. More authoritative. I should have saved the Mastodon thread in its ascendancy, but LibreOffice were still trying to manage objections rather than actually listening, so I was convinced they'd brazen it out. I could just wait until the conversation fizzled, then capture it in all its glory...
Or maybe not...
Amid a sudden dawn of sense, LibreOffice pulled a sharp U-turn - probably prompted by warnings that their project would get forked. They begrudgingly made a retraction atop their original blog post, and deleted their Twitter and Mastodon shares.
On Twitter, even though the initial @LIbreOffice Tweet had gone, I could revisit the wall of disapproval. But on Mastodon the reaction was impossible to reassemble. The thread was broken, the text was unsearchable, and there was no means to isolate replies. The only surfaceable remnants were from the one or two respondents who actually used the #LibreOffice hashtag in their responses. All efforts to recover the full thread proved insanely frustrating.
It's only now that Mastodon is starting to serve as a real replacement for Twitter that we see not only its glaring deficiencies, but also the potential dangers those deficiencies could cause.
Because Mastodon threads or reply-spikes disintegrate into oblivion once the OP is removed, brands on Mastodon can completely obliterate a wave of adverse public reaction simply by deleting their own post. And it's not only brands who might want to do that. Scammers and predators could abuse Mastodon's lack of any post-conversational audit trail to run publicly undetectable schemes. On Twitter, you can reply-search someone who approaches you and check out their integrity. You can't do that on Mastodon. And in certain circumstances that will make Mastodon more dangerous than Twitter.
I believe that if Mastodon really does begin to take off, mainstream Twitter refugees will soon demand operational standards in keeping with their previous environment. It's inconceivable to me that there won't be a clamour for vast improvements to Mastodon's discoverability and archive potential. If Eugen Rochko won't facilitate that, someone else inevitably will.
This brings us into the doorstep of forking the development project, so that it's no longer Mastodon, and the core features can be dictated by someone other than Rochko. Setups such as Vivaldi Social could easily head down that road if their own brand outgrew the Mastodon brand. Which means that if Rochko intends to maintain his strict stance on decentralisation and restrictive features, he must budget for his own impending irrelevance.
Vivaldi Social may or may not exhibit that growth. But some centralised tech operation eventually will. And will be compelled by the masses to provide better safety. Turn what's currently a dark alleyway into a brightly lit street. The time for Rochko to start facilitating mainstream demand, is now, but he could face a tidal wave of dissent from the FOSS community if he does.
If it's to go truly mainstream, Mastodon either begins to centralise from within, or it will be centralised from without. And if Rochko does choose to centralise from within, he'll have some pretty hefty backing. With the mounting of Twitter's exodus, the Fediverse has finally exceeded the Silicon Valley ignore threshold, and the signs of that have become clear...
Yes, the Californian lobbying cartel is starting to poke its nose into Mastodon. In this post, Google's indefatigable mouthpiece the EFF has commenced trying to lay down the law on how Mastodon should be run, monetised and moderated. Unsurprisingly, Big Tech wants the Fediverse moderated in accordance with its own cartel guidelines. Or the SaNtA cLaRa PrInCiPlEs, as the guidelines were called in a bid to make them look... Well, look like something that isn't just a bunch of massive megalomanic corporations deciding what the public are allowed to think, basically.
Meanwhile, fellow Google lobbyist the Internet Archive has appeared on the Mastodon project funders list. And we can expect to see more Silicon Valley nonprofitalists proxying wads of Google's cash in the direction of Mastodon as it shows signs of eroding Big Tech's informational stranglehold and ad revenue.
Some commentators have said it would be impossible for Big Tech to capture the Fediverse, because the core userbase is so antithetical toward the likes of Google.
Whilst the reasoning behind that might be superficially true, Google knows how to manipulate the FOSS community, and has a proven track-record of doing so, via its gob-for-hire the EFF. Most of the Fediverse worships the EFF, and Internet Archive, and Creative Commons, and Wikipedia. All of them Google stooges. So all Google really needs to do is use these insidious lobbyists to soften up the opposition for one small compromise at a time. Work slowly, boil the frog...
And let's remember that if the migration from Twitter continues at its current pace, the FOSS community will become a minority on Mastodon, and their rejection card won't have much relevance anyway.
4,000 small Mastodon admins can block an instance they find ethically questionable, but if you still have 10 massive instances federating with it, the protest might only amount to 5% of the network. You then potentially end up with an old Mastodon and a new Mastodon. Two completely severed communities. Old Mastodon retaining trad values but remaining small. New Mastodon re-gearing for the mainstream and fully open to the usual manipulation and incentive from Big Tech. Ultimately, capture.
The question is: which side of that division would be the original project, and which side would be the fork? The only person with the answer to that as we speak, is Eugen Rochko. But if he has a gram of sense, he ain't gonna tell us until he's forced to.